Traditional fantasy roleplaying games

Semper Initiativus Unum

I have really enjoyed reading through Initiative One recently. It’s a great little blog that unfortunately seems to have been inactive since September of 2010. Even when it was active, it was not very high volume (38 posts 2008 – 2010), but just about everything is worth reading. It has a wonderful historical perspective on OD&D; I read it from cover to cover.

(Aside: I’ve been pondering writing a scraper script that would transform Blogger blogs into epub format documents to make it easier to read them chronologically and offline. There are so many high-quality OSR blogs to catch up on, but Blogger does not make it very convenient to read blogs in that way.)

Basically, cd into a directory to store the downloaded copy, run ‘python [url-of-oldest-post] [name-of-local-file]’ and this script will merrily copy all of the blog posts into one long, simple HTML file which should be good for making ebooks from. I don’t really know anything about making ebooks, but this is a pretty basic format.

Titles and bodies have their own divs, and titles are h3’s.

Images are downloaded and stored locally, and re-linked in the file.

Fair warning: I hacked this together in about half an hour, it’s not too pretty, and it doesn’t do any exception handling. Only works on Blogger blogs.